Author: TeamStarfish

Hello again, I hope you are finding your own adventures.

We were on schedule to release a new episode as promised on November 28th.

However, the user license on the screen reading software I use expired.

Thankfully, I am finally back online. Because I feel really bad about not bringing you Emily’s excellent podcast on schedule.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:31 — 9.9MB)

This episode is about the end of pre-race training and the beginning of training and competition.

You can hear how excited Emily is to take advantage of all the chemistry her and her team built up last year now that many of the Covid restrictions have been repealed and they can spend much more time on the mountains.

And she reminds us of the wonderful support she will be receiving from Torque Snowbords This year.

I look forward to the promised interview with the folks from Torque later this year.

But I want you to do me a favor. I want you to check out a few of Emily’s past episodes.

Because I’m noticing a new confidence to her voice on her podcast that wasn’t there even just a few episodes ago.

After she brings us up to date, she explains the importance of working with her team to establish their goals for the year.

Their biggest goal being to build upon experience from last year and come up with workable voice commands to help Emily be successful on the mountain.

I love hearing the excitement in her voice when she talks about finally finding something that works.

As a website developer and accessibility advisor I know that feeling of having a big breakthrough all too well.

I had a big smile on my face as I imagine you will.

Sadly, she couldn’t include audio of that in this episode.

This is because at least for now she doesn’t have a good way to properly describe them in a voice over.

She will be posting those videos on her social media accounts, so please be sure to follow her using the links at the bottom of this post.

And we will get the audios posted as soon as she figures out how to get them done.

Emily is so stoked by her discovery that she comes back to it.

I think her description is pretty solid, and I’m not a snowboarder at all.

It seems the breakthrough came because she was able to spend more time with her team on the snow.

That allows her to feel the shapes and sizes of the turns along with the commands they were working on.

As Emily says discovering thi turn language is not only big for her but a huge step forward for the sport of blind downhill snowboarding.

And as she reminded us in the beginning Emily’s goals are beyond just winning gold medals herself.

She talked about working on other types of turning.

Then she discusses the change in the podcast to biweekly.

Which I, as her producer, am very thankful for.

She mentions her gratitude for lots of new snow on the mountains.

And before closing she mentioned some of the types of guests you can expect in the near future.

We do want to hear from you about how we are doing with the show.

Are there questions your have, or are there subjects you want her to cover?

You can now also leave comments right here on the blog as well as leaving a rating or review on Apple.

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

I am so proud of Emily, and so excited for what the future holds for my amazing friend.

Guess I better start planning my trip to Italy in 2026 to be there when she steps down from the podium.

Until next time me, Emily, Isaac, and Darling want to thank you for your continued support.

Adventure Ahead!

Hello again, I hope you are getting your week off to a good start.

One thing me and Emily can agree on is the importance of consistency.

Quite often success doesn’t come to the most talented or gifted. Instead it comes to those who are willing to do the work and show up every day.

For a snowboarder it requires year-round training to stay in top physical condition.

For a podcaster it requires recording and releasing new content on a reliable schedule.

And when a podcast host is also a top Paralympic snowboarding athlete, sometimes compromises have to be made.

Which is why going forward we are changing the Shredding For Gold podcast to a biweekly show.

This will allow Emily to record new content while maintaining a much more ambitious training schedule this year.

The change in the podcasting schedule is actually a result of the great news that Torque Snowboards will be fully funding Emily’s chase for that gold medal.

Because of their support Emily will have much better equipment to train with. And she will have the funds to train more often.

I’m not a skier or snowboarder, but I know those lift tickets and travel to and from the mountains can be very expensive even for someone living in Vancouver.

When you add in the costs of providing for ski guides and an intrepid guide dog, it really adds up quickly.

This year she plans to spend much more time flying down those mountains. She has also had to spend a lot of time rehabbing past injuries.

For transparency I need to tell you and to remind Emily that my own health challenges have also contributed to the podcast not being as consistent as it should be.

Thankfully, the physical therapy is working and my knee pain is much better. My energy levels are getting better every day.

Still, I appreciate Emily making this decision.

When Emily and I were discussing starting her podcast, I told her two things.

One, all decisions about a podcast should be made based upon what works for the host at the time.

And two, you don’t have to get every decision right the first time. Because they can all be changed as your knowledge and experience grow.

I find knowing these two things makes it easier for a lot of people to take the plunge and start a podcast.

We started with the goal of releasing new content every Monday including a combination of monologues and interviews. Thinking that if we needed to we could fill in with interviews on other people’s podcasts.

For the most part that worked, but we have learned that this schedule was too ambitious.

So, going forward, we will be posting new content every other Monday.

I hope you will continue to follow Emily’s progress and support us by listening, rating, reviewing, and sharing.

We would love to hear what you think about the new schedule. We would also appreciate any questions you have for Emily or suggestions you have for future content.

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

I am so proud of Emily. This decision just shows how strong she is. By being willing to change, she is taking steps to make her show even better.

Until next time, Adventure Ahead!

Hello again friends, I hope your week is getting off to a great start.

Whether you have been following Emily’s progress for a while, or you are brand new to her podcast; you are going to love hearing about her journey towards winning Gold in the Paralympics for downhill snowboard racing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:51 — 9.5MB)

This episode is the first of her second season.

And we are starting it off with a huge announcement.

Torque Snowboards

Has decided to fully fund Emily and her team!

You can hear the excitement and gratitude in her voice.

She talks about how expensive it has gotten to continue chasing her dream of winning gold in the Paralympics, and how those costs have gone up every year.

Listen as she describes all the things Torque is going to do for her and her team both on and off of the mountains.

I also love the little peak she gives you into the process of meeting the people from Torque and having them decide to sponsor her.

I’m very proud of having done my small part to help get the conversation started that lead to this huge event in the life of an athlete like my friend Emily.

As she said this is the kind of opportunity that every independent athlete is hoping for and working towards.

Be sure and follow her on social media to check out the previous posts about Torque.

That is also where you will be notified of future publicity events. Such as the big unboxing of new gear and clothes that Emily mentioned on the show.

I do have one question. 🙂 If Emily and her guide Isaac are getting new gear, what about darling?

I mean come on the internet is crying out for the next overly cute Dog Star.

She also talks about being thankful for being able to work with the same talented guides this year. You can listen to an earlier episode here about the importance of the athlete guide relationship.

She also speaks about being grateful for being in good physical condition as she works the pre-season preparing for an exciting new race season.

We do want to hear from you about how we are doing with the show.

Are there questions your have, or are there subjects you want her to cover?

You can now also leave comments right here on the blog as well as leaving a rating or review on Apple.

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

I am so proud of Emily, and so excited for what the future holds for my amazing friend.

Guess I better start planning my trip to Italy in 2026 to be there when she steps down from the podium.

Until next time me, Emily, Isaac, and Darling want to thank you for your continued support.

Adventure Ahead!

Hello again, As Emily’s producer we hope that you are all doing as well as possible given all the challenges the world is facing right now.

So, here we are with episode 18. It follows a summer break from Emily’s position as a para-educator assistant. It also follows some much needed time at home with her family.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:02 — 12.4MB)

Podcast Intro Experimentation

First, I want to tell you that I am loving how Emily is playing around with the intro to her podcast.

The combination of the race start sounds and some strong rap music sounds really good.

End Of School Year Challenges

She shares about how the end of the school year always brings on lots of craziness because the kids are experiencing the eagerness for the year to be over so they can go on vacation.

She pondered how this happens every year but is still a surprise.

She talked about how she also trained hard while working hard with her school kids.

And then Emily mentions about her vacation.

Emily’s Vacation

She shared about spending some of her time visiting relatives in Calgary that she hadn’t seen for a while. And then she gushes over her first visit to the Calgary Stamped.

Which as a Texan it pains me to admit that based on the number of days the Stamped is the biggest event of its kind in the world.

Apology And Future Podcast Schedule

She apologized for being gone and promised y’all lots of great new podcast content soon.

She doesn’t have anything to apologize for as it was my fault that you didn’t receive more posts.

She recorded interviews on other people’s shows, and she sent me this audio about three weeks ago.

I’m so looking forward to being able to continue helping Emily grow her audience and get closer to those Paralympic Gold Medals.

Emily shared about the financial challenges of covering the ever increasing costs of training as an athlete.

Thanking Past Sponsors

She wanted to give thanks to the local companies and organizations who sponsored her in the early days.

Including her second home during the training season Boler Mountain.

She credits their support in the form of access to the mountain as being critical to her development as a snowboarder.

Another one of her early sponsors was the Purple Moose Sock Co.

They provided here with cool socks to try on. And warm socks are pretty important to winter sport athletes. They also provided Emily with compression socks which help an athlete recover from strenuous training more quickly.

Emily continues to wear their socks, and since she has known them; they started producing socks made exclusively in Canada.

And there was All Bout Cheese.

They provided financial support to Emily. According to their website they are they are London Ontario’s premier artisan cheese shop.

Fully Funded

Emily teased the sponsor review again mentioning that this will be a game changer.

The sponsor will be providing snowboards, clothes, travel costs, and even help with her social media accounts.

Since she sent this recording to me, she has announced the name of the company and posted the photo shoot.

But I have decided not to review that here. Instead I will write a post very soon with all the details.

She then shared some of her future training plans. Including long board skateboarding, stand-up paddle boarding, solo kayaking, and more.

I love how she realizes that her fans might be concerned for her, so she mentioned the list of safety equipment she has purchased to allow her to train safely.

She has also promised us some more interviews very soon. I can’t wait because I always learn just as much as y’all do.

Me and Emily truly do want to hear from you. We want to hear your opinions and suggestions so we can make the show better.

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

Until next time me, Emily, and Darling want to thank you for your continued support.

Adventure Ahead!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:37 — 13.1MB)

Emily and I are so happy to share the latest happenings with you through the podcast.

The episode starts out with her new intro music which I love.

It reminds me of the start of ski races I’ve seen on TV during the Olympics and Paralympics.

I can just picture Emily flying down the hill with a big smile on her face headed towards that first gold medal.

Then she recaps the podcast and shares the teamstarfish.ca website.

Then about 7:00 minutes in she gets to the good stuff.

She explains how moving from Ontario to Vancouver brought her to the attention of Canadian Alpine Snowboarding.

She talks about how this has lead to new opportunities including training with coaches from Team Canada.

She then explained that these coaches didn’t join her right away due to the fact that Emily is working with a new team of guides of her own.

The Team Canada coach would join them after they had worked together fora few weeks.

Knowing the new coach was coming made Emily nervous, but she explains how that is a good thing.

As she tells the story you can feel the variety of emotions in her voice. Which shows just how much she wants to succeed.

She talks about having to have multiple game plans to deal with a variety of snow conditions and levels of visibility.

She shared about how having the additional coaches could look at their methods objectively and make suggestions if necessary.

The new race coach told Emily that he was really impressed with the way she rides down the mountain. And that obviously made her happy.

She talks about discovering the coach was local and how that would lead to more opportunities to learn.

And then she talked about how many opportunities for snowboarding, training, racing, etc in the Vancouver area.

Which is a validation of what she thought when deciding to move cross country in the first place.

She teased some big announcements. And just like Emily I can’t wait until we are able to share the great exciting news with you.

That’s it for today’s episode of SFG.

Me and Emily would really love to hear from you. Your comments or messages are how we make the show better.

We would also love it if you left a rating and review on the podcast.

You can connect with Emily through Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

Until next time me, Emily, and Darling want to thank you for your continued support.

Adventure Ahead!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:07 — 12.9MB)

Hello again, We hope you have had a good weekend.

I am happy to tell you that Emily has a brand new episode of her show for you this week.

As a world-class Paralympic athlete sometimes her training or racing schedules will get in the way of the podcast.

We do our best to avoid that because we know you count on hearing about Emily’s continuing journey to that Gold Medal podium.

But sometimes it is just unavoidable. We appreciate your understanding.

This show is dedicated to her mom and all the other athletes moms in honor of Mother’s day.

She talks about the importance of her mom both in the beginning of her athlete’s journey and more so today.

She talks about how her mom discovered the problem with her vision even before the doctors did.

She shares about how her family, especially her mom, always told her that they would support her in going after her dreams.

You will hear her talk about playing basketball in elementary school.

She shares some great memories about her time on that team and the support she received from her parents especially her mom.

With the help of her mom she learned at an early age that with hard work and determination anything is possible.

She shares how that lesson is helping her today with her goal of getting blind snowboarding added to the Paralympics and becoming its first Gold Medal winner.

You can hear the love when she mentions how her mom and sister are supporting her efforts by raising money for her travel and training through the sale of home made crafts with the Team Starfish name on them.

You can find them at Facebook.com/teamstarfishcrafts

They have some usual items like kids sweaters, shawls, and a variety of hats.

But the coolest item, one I am truly jealous of, is a Emily mini me.

It is a blind snowboarder with snowboard and all. It does sound really cool. I am going to have to buy one for my desk.

Besides all the work her mom, sis, and their friends do to crochet items to sell in support of team Starfish, they also used to host chili or spaghetti dinners.

She is so grateful to continue to receive so much love and support from her mom even though they live thousands of miles apart now.

And she promised to have her mom on the podcast sometime soon. So you can learn from her mom’s experience raising a visually impaired child.

And maybe her mom will share a few enlightening or embarrassing stories about Emily? 😉

Emily teased a future interview with her new hill guide named Isaac.

And she has more great stuff to share with you from this past winter.

And best of all she will be continuing to release new content even though the race season is over.

As a former showman I love her show must go on approach.

Me and Emily truly do want to hear from you. We want to hear your opinions and suggestions so we can make the show even better.

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

Until next time me, Emily, and Darling want to thank you for your continued support.

Adventure Ahead!

Hello again, I hope you had an enjoyable weekend with friends and family.

This is part two of the interview Emily did with Justin Evangelho host of the Disenabled Podcast.

A couple of weeks back Emily suffered a minor injury. It happened while practicing racing down the snow line I think it’s called.

She has since recovered. But the rehab and then the effort needed to catch back up with her training has got her off-schedule with new recordings.

We will have the final part of this wonderful interview next week. And then hopefully we will bring you a brand new interview with her new guide.

From Justin

In this second part of my interview with Canadian blind Snowboarder, Emily Trepanier, we chat about how the pandemic has impacted her ability to hit the slopes.

She shares about how she kept busy with more intensive indoor training and the results of reaching out to a local training center.

We talked about how snowboarding can be a physically unforgiving sport.
And Emily shared about some of the physical, mental, emotional, and monetary costs of pursuing the goal of competing in the Paralympics.

You can feel the range of emotions in her voice. Especially when she talked about returning to the snow.

We talked about her decision to relocate from Ontario to Vancouver to better chase her dreams.

She demonstrates a wealth of problem solving to continue moving forward to that dream of holding that Paralympic Gold Medal in her hands.

Connect with Emily

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also check out her Team Starfish Page.

And you can also send her an email.

Connect With Justin

Disenabled Podcast: www.anchor.fm/justin-evangelho9

Facebook: www.facebook.com/justin.evangelho

Twitter: www.twitter.com/evangelhojustin

Email: thedisenabledpodcast@gmail.com

Stay tuned for the remaining two parts of this interview as well as the next interview from Emily.

We want to thank Justin for the opportunity for Emily to share her story on his wonderful podcast.

Please help us do that by liking, commenting, and sharing.

Emily, Darling, and I want to thank you for your continued support.

As Emily would say Adventure Ahead!

Hello again,

I hope you are having a great week so far.

Emily has been out on the slopes with her race team working her butt off to become an even better snowboarder.

So, we are sharing an interview that Emily did for The Disenabled Podcast.

This interview took place over three episodes, and this is part one.

From Justin

In this episode I chat with blind competitive snowboarder, and prospective Paralympian, Emily Trepanier about where her love for the sport began, her experience returning to the slopes after 18 months, and how she went from taking up snowboarding as a recreational sport, to possibly gracing the Paralympic podium with a gold medal draped around her neck.

Connect with Emily

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also check out her Team Starfish Page.

And you can also send her an email.

Contact Justin

Email: thedisenabledpodcast@gmail.com

Stay tuned for the remaining two parts of this interview as well as the next interview from Emily.

We want to thank Justin for the opportunity for Emily to share her story on his wonderful podcast.

Please help us do that by liking, commenting, and sharing.

Me, Emily, and Darling want to thank you for your continuing support.

As Emily would say Adventure Ahead!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:40 — 15.0MB)

Hello again; This week Emily is going to share more about the relationship between her and her coaches.

She talked about how critical a good relationship is and how much her and her team work on their communication.

She played the audio from a video of a recent practice session.

And she explains what all the terminology means that her and her coaches are using.

She also explained how they worked together to come up with words to communicate upcoming conditions and how Emily is supposed to respond.

The truth is that her guides are her eyes on the hills and mountains.

They have to communicate seamlessly to keep Emily safe and to allow her to perform at her best.

But all this work will hopefully pay off in those Paralympic gold medals Emily is chasing.

She has promised to interview her guide Isaac in the next episode of the show

So, stay tuned for that conversation next week.

Me and Emily truly do want to hear from you. We want to hear your opinions and suggestions so we can make the show better.

You can follow Emily on Face Book, Twitter, or Instagram.

You can also send her an email.

If you have questions about the network, please email me here.

We want to thank our generous sponsors at Blubrry.

We couldn’t do this without their financial and technical support.

Until next time me, Emily, and Darling want to thank you for your continued support.

Adventure Ahead!